posting

I enjoyed reading about the cause and effect situations on the web site. The scenario with the car made me think quite a bit about what the law would decide in that given scenario. It is certainly a chain reaction, and who would hold responsibility? I felt their explanation and analysis of why many more areas of reasoning come into effect when deciding who is at blame for this car accident. I liked how there were practice questions for us to complete. I found myself doing very well on them as a result of reading the page on cause and effect. I think these theories are very relevant to our lives because although not all of us will go into fields where this is heavily required (such as law or counseling), almost ever career that I can think of will use this method of deduction and logic at some point. I found the end of the page to be the most helpful, mainly because it gives you a list of the 3 factors the strength of causal argument relies on (how acceptable or demonstrable the implied comparison is,

how likely the case for causation seems to be, and how credible the "only significant difference" or "only significant commonality" claim is.)

book question # 3

Appeal to fear is a tactic that I described earlier in my blog post, and is something that is used quite a bit in todays society in order to get people to believe/buy something. While looking for ads to analyze for this prompt, I discovered that there were more ads that use this tactic than I could have imagined. The one that I ultimately decided to analyze for this assignment is a an ad for a medicine that that is supposed to increase health and lessen the risk of heart attacks. Instead of advertising themselves as such, they draw reads to the bold words on top reading “It was a year ago that I had a heart attack and died”. This statement is very misleading for many reasons. If you read the small print underneath it, the man in question did not really die, but rather his heart stopped for a small amount of time. This ad is very misleading in that sense. The ad draws readers in that the scary heading, and all of this is to convince the reader to buy the medicine. The medicine in no way prevents a heart attack, and through online research I learned it actually not not do a lot in terms of helping. The company knows that heart failure is something that affects many people and most of us have known family or friends who have suffered from it. The company is using this fear of it happening to us to sell their product, something that is unfair and unethical.

Prompt #3, something we have not discussed yet

Appeal to pity is an argument tactic that I see a lot in this day in age. Appeal to pity is the general idea of using someone's emotions to help influence an argument. Appeal to emotion works in a variety of way, but appeal to fear is much more specific. Appeal to fear uses someone or somethings current condition to make you feel a certain way. Usually, the person making the argument will try to connect your feeling of pity to an argument, and much of the time, a monetary donation. Although it is often a monetary donation, the arguing party may also be seeking non-monetary donations and votes. This is something that is especially relevant to our current situation. Over the past few months, we have had many disasters in places such as American Samoa, the Philippines, and Haiti. These areas have suffered intense, unthinkable damage and desperately need money and supplies to get them up and running again. I do, however, believe that many organizations collecting for these funds use appeal to pity. They make you feel that if you do not donate, you are heartless. They flaunt pictures of the rubble, starving children, and corpses in your face in order to appeal to your emotion. I personally feel that this is wrong, and although these organizations truly need the money and supplies they are requesting, they are going about it the wrong way. This style of unfairly connecting an issue with a desired action is often misused.

posting #1

Appealing to emotion is a very dangerous thing that many advertisers and politicians engage in. Not only is it used formally, like in ads and speeches, it is also used socially, in day to day conversations with others. Appealing to emotion trys to take a feeling that someone has, and get that person to make a decision or believe something as a result of that feeling. Sometimes, the belief is relevant to the feeling, but in cases we are analyzing in this class, it is being used unethically. The belief has very little to no connection with the emotion. For example a method of appealing to emotion is referred to as appeal to fear. Appeal to fear tries to get one to connect a fear with a belief/decision. It could be used as a sales lure, for example because there have been robberies in your neighborhood, you should buy our new ULTRA alarm system” or in social situations “If you do not walk me to my car, I will get lost and get hurt”. While these arguments are somewhat related to the fear, there are some that have almost no connection at all. In the textbook on page 192, there is a great political ad. It presents the reader with crime stats, but then adds a potential Senators name at the bottom. There is no given connection between the election and the neighborhood crime. The campaign team want be implying that the candidate will strive to reduce neighborhood crime, but this is a very sneaky way to do it. By doing this the potential candidate is making no promises and in no way even stating that he/she will even make it a priority. The very intimidating detains in the ad appeal to the readers fear, so that they will want to vote for the candidate.